


Memory Lane

by Rhinozilla



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 12:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7574710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinozilla/pseuds/Rhinozilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While on the road during the winter months, Carol tries to comfort Lori. Daryl unknowingly helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory Lane

Snow didn’t come to Georgia the winter after the world ended, but rain did. Two months after fleeing the Greene farm, the group had fallen into the pattern of nomads, never staying in one place more than a few nights. Always moving, always on the back roads, and almost always in silence. For the past week, a steady deluge had poured over the state. It turned the roads to mush, severely compromised their visibility, and made walkers blend into the soggy background like the trees.

“Finding the truck was a godsend.” Lori suddenly spoke.

The quiet inside the red Suburban had been so all-encompassing that it made Carol jerk slightly in surprise when the other woman spoke.

“Sorry.” Lori sighed with a dry chuckle. “Couldn’t stand the silence anymore.”

They had been on the road for a halting six hours, stopping every so often for Lori to use the bathroom. She wasn’t showing yet, but all of the other symptoms were prevalent. In those six hours of driving, they had fallen into the familiar lull of a long car ride. The back of the silver Dodge Ram was hardly visible through the Suburban’s windshield. Carol had been driving for the past four hours, to give Lori a break. Glenn, Maggie, and Beth were in the newly acquired pick up, and ahead of them, the green Tucson led their caravan, with Rick, T-Dog, Carl, and Hershel inside.

“No, you’re right.” Carol cleared her throat, shifting in her seat to refocus. “We’d be up a creek if we hadn’t found it.”

“We’re almost in a creek anyway.” Lori snorted, looking out the passenger window to the torrential rain that was overflowing the roadside ditches. “Is it ever going to stop?”

Carol hummed at that, squinting through the rain as the windshield wipers whipped side to side at the maximum speed. “Eventually. It’s kinda nice…The sound of rain has always been soothing, don’t you think?”

Lori made a noncommittal noise and glanced toward the back seat, where the third occupant of the Suburban hadn’t made a noise in four hours. “You’re not the only one who thinks so.”

After the rain had made it violently clear that it was there to stay, Daryl had been forced to take shelter inside the vehicles away from the exposure of his motorcycle. The bike had been loaded into the bed of the silver pick up. Carol could see the outline of it through the tarp that was barely doing its job of covering the machine. A motorcycle could endure the elements, could get whipped by rain and wind for hours on end and be just fine afterward; Daryl, for all his talk, couldn’t.

Despite his humming and hawing about the whole situation, Daryl had begrudgingly piled into the back seat of the Suburban, soaked to the bone and looking like he was fighting every fiber in his body to keep from shivering. Since getting dry and getting warm, he’d slowly sunk out of sight and wound up horizontal across the back seats, out like a light.

“It rained the whole time during a family trip to the beach.” Lori murmured, almost absently. “Carl slept the whole time through that too.”

Carol pursed her lips, turning the steering wheel slightly to follow the messy curve of the road and keep close after the tail lights of the Dodge. Rick and Lori hadn’t spoken in two months, not since leaving the farm. Neither of them talked to anyone else about what had happened, nor did anyone of the group question after it. Rick turned cold any time he and Lori shared even accidental eye contact. The driving arrangements never put the two in the same vehicle, which usually meant Lori and Carol wound up together. Maybe no one else wanted to talk about the fallout, but Carol was more than willing to be the woman’s shoulder to lean on in the meantime.

This was the first time Lori had broached a subject even close to that of her family or her marriage, and Carol wasn’t about to derail her if that was what she needed.

“We still went to the beach though.” Lori sighed, leaning back against her seat. “It just poured and poured…We didn’t even leave the car…just…sat there and watched it rain.”

The Dodge wiggled a bit on the road in front of them, but Carol wasn’t able to avoid the front passenger tire diving into the same deep hole that the truck had. The entire Suburban lurched to the right before bouncing back up onto the road. The supplies that had been loaded into the enclosed bed of the Suburban shifted and bumped against each other, and the frame of the truck groaned in protest. The Dodge’s brake lights flickered once but then kept going forward.

Carol glanced into the rearview mirror briefly before returning her gaze to the road ahead. Aside from the sound of shifting around to get comfortable, Daryl didn’t give any indication of stirring. He either slept like a cat or like a brick; there was no in-between. Today was like a brick, and she didn’t blame him. He was obviously exhausted. They all were.

“That sounds like a nice trip.” She commented, reluctant now to let the silence return. “It’s good to have those memories.”

Lori deftly wiped at her eyes and sniffed once, dropping her gaze to the floorboard.

“We never took family trips.” Carol found herself saying. “Ed was out of town a lot for work, so when he had time off, he didn’t want to go anywhere.”

Rain continued to lash against the hood of the truck. Distant thunder reached their ears.

“Family vacations never seem to go according to plan, do they?” Lori chuckled.

Carol tilted her head in quiet agreement.

“I took Sophia to visit my parents once.” She smiled gently. “She was only two years old. The terrible twos, you can imagine.”

Lori sighed in empathy and shook her head.

“Well, Ed just wouldn’t…couldn’t tolerate that, so I took her to visit my parents. It was fall. Everything was changing colors. Took her to a carnival. It was…nice.” Carol trailed away slightly before drawing herself back and looking to Lori wryly. “No rain.”

The other woman ran a hand through her hair, “Surely we have to be stopping sometime soon. It’s gonna be dark in a few hours.”

Up ahead, the Tucson turned left at a crossroad, and the pickup followed suit. Carol found herself slowing to a stop at the red Stop sign out of habit, caught herself, exchanged an amused look with Lori, and accelerated again, tires spitting some mud as she did so.

The new road was surrounded on either side by far-reaching barren crop fields, which had been overgrown by tall grass and pushed down by the weight of the rain. It was the most bland and nondescript landscape that they had driven across yet.

“I spy with my little eye…” Lori remarked sardonically, obviously thinking the same thing.

A sleepy, muffled voice garbled from the back seat. “Please don’t.”

Lori snorted and glanced back at Daryl, but Carol just shook her head and kept her eyes forward. He didn’t sit up or make any noise to indicate that he was properly awake. Lori faced forward again, exchanging an amused look with Carol.

“What about you, Daryl?” Lori asked, watching the rain. “Any good family trips?”

A long moment of silence stretched after that question. Either he’d fallen back to sleep or was pretending in order to avoid a possibly very uncomfortable question. Carol wasn’t sure she could imagine a Dixon family vacation…not sure she wanted to. Lori seemed to come to the same conclusion, as she shifted awkwardly, as though looking for a new topic of conversation.

Eventually, though, the mumbled response came. “Does this count?”

Carol couldn’t decide if he was being sarcastic or just deadpan; however, the remark got a small but genuine smile out of Lori. That was worth its weight in gold these days.

“Yeah.” Carol replied softly. “This counts.”


End file.
